OK, Joe Flynn, was best known as Capt. Binghampton on the tv series “McHale’s Navy.” He died of a heart attack/drowning in 1974.
It’s well reported that he was wearing a cast on a broken leg at the time of his midnight swim. However, some time ago when I was perusing some contemporary reports, none of them mentioned a cast.
Can anyone find some contemporary corroboration ib this part of the story (cast on a broken leg). I don’t think there’s much question about the heart attack.
OK, I didn’t get jack beans for this question when I first axed it, so I’m bumping it.
And I’ll continue to bump it every six years until I get an answer!
“Well reported”? I can’t find a single example. Wackypedia doesn’t mention it. Do you have a cite for your claim that a cast was involved, at all?
The only online reference from WP is seemingly offline or gone. Have you checked the two paper references (Variety and the Youngstown paper) listed in the WP article?
ETA: Further searching only finds the claim that he had a cast, no cites, no evidence.
ETA: I did find this hilarious cross-link, though.
I found one paper report Daily News - Google News Archive Search - no mention of a cast.
I should think that the only thing more awkward than trying to swim with a cast on your leg is trying to swim with a lead bottom.
Well, that’s kinda the question I was asking, poorly worded as it was six years ago. A better rendering would have been ‘widely attested with no contemporary attribution.’
Nicely played!
I’d really have to see an authoritative cite that he had the cast. Everything I can find points to it being a spurious addition, some time long after his death, with one low-grade writeup after another pointing to each other as their sources.
For what little it’s worth, here’s the obituary as it appeared in the NY Times in 1974. It mentions that he was found dead in his pool, but never says that he had a cast or that he’d suffered a heart attack.
Flynn was a lot younger than I thought:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.obituaries/pxP6JV0E9aw
Perhaps there was a jumbled sentence somewhere that got a reference to the “cast of McHale’s Navy” mixed up with a cast on a broken leg.
It was kind of a dumb sitcom, but I loved it when I was a kid. Remember Happy? He must have stayed in the Navy, eventually becoming Captain of a major cruise ship.
He didn’t stay in the Navy all that time. He spent some time a TV news writer in the Midwest.
That would mean the cast of the show pulled him under and killed him. Whoa. Instead of fragged, he got… dragged.
I do love curious little memes like this. Short of finding contemporary obits and the like and tracing their evolution over the years, there’s likely no way to find out where it came from. (I suppose a look at the autopsy or death certificate would be authoritative one way or the other.)
Sounds like a job for Cecil.
Ahem. I said… Sounds like a job for… Cecil!
Wha…wha…what?
Why is it me? Why is it always me? 
I sent the link for this thread to one of Cecil’s minions, who replied “Not seeing anything anywhere about a cast on his leg at the time of his death.”
So, don’t hold your breath that Cecil’s going to swoop in on this.